Sen. Nye assails ‘Merchants of Death' on Sept. 4, 1934

On this day in 1934, the Senate Munitions Committee met for the first time in the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to investigate whether arms makers had unduly influenced the U.S. decision to enter World War I in 1917.

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To chair the seven-member special committee, the Senate’s Democratic majority chose Sen. Gerald Nye (1892-1971), a North Dakota Republican. Nye pledged that “when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.”

As the specter of new wars spread across Europe in the mid-1930s, concern mounted in the United States that “merchants of death” would once more unnecessarily drag the nation into a foreign conflict. Nye triggered the creation of the panel with a resolution calling for a probe of the munitions industry.

Over the next 18 months, the “Nye Committee” held 93 hearings. It questioned more than 200 witnesses, including J. P. Morgan Jr. and Pierre du Pont. Alger Hiss, who was later convicted of perjury in a Communist spy case, served as the committee’s legal counsel.

Senate historians found that the committee proved unable to come up with any hard evidence of an active conspiracy among arms makers, Nevertheless, the panel’s reports fed widespread popular feeling against “greedy munitions interests.”

The Senate cut off funding in 1936 after Nye accused the late former President Woodrow Wilson of withholding essential information from Congress as it weighed a declaration of war against Germany. Sen. Carter Glass (D-Va.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, excoriated Nye for “dirt-daubing the sepulcher of Woodrow Wilson.”

Nevertheless, the Nye panel helped inspire passage congressional neutrality acts in the mid-1930s that signaled profound American opposition to overseas involvement — which lasted until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.